Pursuing quantitative performance measures can actively degrade the quality of public service.

Evidence

However, public service workers, like machine operators, must also be assessed for quality control, since producing a volume of items is meaningless without consideration of the standard maintained in … Here, paradoxically the search for performance measures can interfere with the quality of public service. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1200

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Campbell’s law / Goodhart’s law and to the audit-society literature on metric gaming.